Irwin Berent – Your Code of Ethics

Historic Views on Government – Allen

Honest opinion about government from William B. Allen:

This is a way of proceeding in our country which leads to disaster…. [P]eople are in the habit of thinking in terms of race, or gender–anything except of being an American. Until we learn once again to use the language of American freedom in an appropriate way that embraces all of us, we're going to continue to harm this country.
C-SPAN, May 23, 1992

It is misleading to call affirmative action reverse discrimination, as we often do. There is no such thing, any more than the opposite of injustice, for example, is reverse injustice.

James Madison thought that the most important test of American freedom would be the ability of our political system to guarantee the rights of minorities without exceptional provisions for their protection. Affirmative action is incompatible with that constitutional design. Whoever calls for affirmative action declares at the same time that that constitutional design has failed and that we can no longer live with our Constitution.
American Enterprise Institute, May 21, 1985

A black political scientist, William Allen is a former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who emphasizes the importance of avoiding race-consciousness and its balkanizing force.

Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.

Historic Views on Government – Samuel Adams

Honest opinion about government from Samuel Adams:

What a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent.
Massachusetts circular letter, Feb. 11, 1768

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
"The Rights of the Colonists," 1772

American Revolutionary leader and member of the Massachusetts legislature (1765-1774), Samuel Adams was instrumental in maintaining activities of the Committees of Correspondence among American colonies and a leader in the agitation that led to the Boston Tea Party. He was also a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses and a signer of the Declaration of the Independence.

Historic Views on Government – Acton

Honest opinion about government from Lord Acton:

Liberty alone demands for its realization the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

…Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
The Home and Foreign Review, 1862

The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.
The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877

Lord Acton was an English historian who served as Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge (1895-1902). He edited Cambridge Modern History and wrote on the French Revolution and modern history. One of his most noteworthy books is The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).

Historic Views on Government – Aristotle

Honest opinion about government from Aristotle:

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.
Rhetoric, I

Good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.

Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.
Politics, 4th century B.C.

Aristotle was Plato's most outstanding pupil (367-347 B.C.), a tutor of Alexander the Great (c.342-335) and a teacher in Athens (335-322). He wrote and lectured on logic, metaphysics, natural science, ethics and politics, and rhetoric and poetics. Aristotle's great philosophical work is Metaphysics (13 books), but he is also famous for many other works, including Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics.

Historic Views on Government – John Adams

Honest opinion about government from John Adams:

The judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, so that it may be a check upon both.
   Thoughts on Government, 1776

Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
   Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, 1765

That all men are born to equal rights is true. Every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has. This is as indubitable as a moral government in the universe. But to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life, is as gross a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French revolution.
   Letter to John Taylor of Caroline, 1814

John Adams was elected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, serving until his appointment as commissioner to France (1777-1778). He served as Vice-President for two terms (1788-1796) and in 1796 was elected the second President of the United States. The views of Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, on human nature, on the need for government, and on the causes of political conflict are significant contributions to Conservative social, political, and economic thought. His A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (3 volumes, 1787-1788) is a classic.

Historic Views on Government – Jefferson

Honest opinion about government from Thomas Jefferson:

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him?

Still one thing more, fellow citizens–a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.
First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

The principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States (1801-1809), Thomas Jefferson was a strong advocate of religious freedom, and his emphasis on limited constitutional government, states' rights, and individual liberty have enormously influenced Conservative political theory.

Historic Views on Government – Bandow

Honest opinion about government from Douglas Bandow:

[T]he conventional wisdom is that the only alternative to a government-run, taxpayer-financed system is private charity, which would inevitably allow millions of needy to "fall through the cracks." Thus, the question in the minds of most public officials is, what kind of public system should we use?…
   In the early years of the American republic, people created an effective, community-based safety net, one that relied on personal involvement rather than bureaucratic action.
   In fact, many different forms of social organization have been used by different societies at different times to provide what is today called "welfare." In some societies, the extended family or kin group is the primary locus of providing a "safety net."
   In other cases it comes through the church—the Mormons, for instance. Similarly, in Islamic society welfare is financed by alms-giving, mandatory for Muslims, but the program is only organized rather than run by the state.
   Perhaps the most interesting form of welfare institution in the West, at least to those concerned about individual liberty and personal independence, is collective self-help, or mutual aid as it is more commonly called. Coexisting with traditional charity, mutual aid was the dominant form of welfare up into the 1920s….
   …History provides us with numerous effective and voluntary alternatives to today's public system, but, unfortunately, it gives us few lessons on how to convince policy-makers…to begin shifting the responsibility from the public to the private sector.
   "Welfare reform has become a forgotten issue," Oct. 21, 1992

A former aid to President Ronald Reagan and Special Assistant to the President for Policy Development under Reagan, Douglas Bandow is a nationally syndicated columnist and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute (since 1984). Bandow, who holds a law degree from Stanford, was an editor at Inquiry Magazine and a deputy representative to the United Nation's Conference on the Law of the Sea. He edited U.S. Aid to the Developing World (1985).

Historic Views on Government – Aron

Honest opinion about government from Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron:

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinions merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The Revolution provides him with his opium.

Communist faith justifies the means. Communist faith forbids the fact that there are many roads towards the Kingdom of God.

[F]ar from being the…philosophy of the Proletariat, Communism merely makes use of…pseudo-science in order to attain its own end, the seizure of power.
The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955

French sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist, Raymond Aron was a lecturer at the University of Cologne (1930-1931) and taught at various institutions, including the University of Toulouse, where he taught sociology. He received many honorary degrees and wrote many papers and books, but is especially well known for L'Opium des Intellectuels (1955) [The Opium of the Intellectuals]. He wrote also Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1961).

Historic Views on Government – Cal Thomas

Honest opinion about government from Cal Thomas:

The country must not be stampeded into another round of spending on programs that don't work. We should regularly reassess race relations and reach out to minorities to help them with their special problems. But their biggest problem is not lack of money, it is lack of family. No federal program will have a greater impact on crime and other antisocial behavior than the return of the black man as husband to his wife and father to his children. Since 1965, the number of out-of-wedlock births has more than tripled. It is now a cliche that more young black men are in prison than in college.
Lawrence Mead of New York University has observed, "What matters for success is less whether your father was rich or poor than whether you knew your father at all." Nothing will substitute for or have the same effect in the rearing of a child than a man who keeps his promises to his wife and loves his children.
"Violence wasn't about civil rights," May 7, 1992

A columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Cal Thomas was with NBC-TV News from 1973 to 1977. He has won the AMY Writing Award and AP and UPI Spot News Awards. A strong advocate of traditional values, he is the author of Public Persons and Private Lives: Intimate Interviews (1979), Uncommon Sense (1990), and Things That Matter Most (1994).

Historic Views on Government – Paul Johnson

Honest opinion about government from Paul Johnson:

The disillusion with socialism and other forms of collectivism, which became the dominant spirit of the 1980s, was only one aspect of a much wider loss of faith in the state as an agency of benevolence. The state was, up to the 1980s, the greater gainer of the twentieth century; and the central failure. Before 1914 it was rare for the public sector to embrace more than 10 percent of the economy; by the end of the 1970s, and even beyond, the state took up to 45 percent or more of the GNP in liberal countries, let alone totalitarian ones. But whereas, at the time of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged state could increase the sum total of human happiness, by the 1990s this view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing and dispirited band of zealots, most of them academics. The experiment had been tried in innumerable ways; and it had failed in nearly all of them. The state had proved itself an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster. It had also proved itself the greatest killer of all time. By the 1990s, state action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 million people during the century, more perhaps than it had succeed in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. Its inhuman malevolence had more than kept pace with its growing size and expanding means.
Modern Times, 1983, 1991

British historian, journalist, and broadcaster, Paul Johnson was educated at Stonyhurst and Magdalen College, Oxford. He has edited journals, especially the New Statesman, and was professor of communications at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Some of his works include The Offshore Islanders (1972), Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect (1974), Pope John XXIII (1975), A History of Christianity (1976), Enemies of Society (1977), Modern Times (1983), and Intellectuals (1988).